Playing at War

The No Longer Nasty Party's former spokesbeing for muscular Christianity has been bringing moral succour to the over-stretched and ill-equipped personnel of Britain's armed forces by likening the business of killing and/or being killed to a football game. "We need to decide if we want to stay in the first division or slide into the second division," he said, doubtless hoping to call to his listeners' minds the Conservative Party's Argie-bashing glory days of old. Anyway, Dr Fox gave the obligatory promise of tough decisions ruthlessly taken, and made generous provision for the deductive powers of the military mind by noting explicitly that there would be winners and losers at the end of the process. Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives intend to "look beyond defence in the traditional sense" of killing fuzzy-wuzzies by the cubic yard; possibly they still intend bringing back National Service and establishing a nice smooth pipeline to pump human resources from the faith schools of the Church Militant into the armed forces, or possibly Dr Fox was just blathering, as Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives so often seem to do. Then again, given Dr Fox's apparent idea that Britain should be the military equal, rather than the military vassal, of the United States, perhaps Daveybloke's Cuddly Conscripts merely intend putting the country in a time machine and taking it back to 1913 or thereabouts. Dr Fox dismissed Britain's international obligations with a wave of his hand: "We cannot accept the assumption ... that Britain will always operate as part of an alliance" because "we have unique national interests and have to maintain the capability to act unilaterally if required", in a way that lesser breeds self-evidently must not. It is not clear to me whether this means Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives plan to withdraw from NATO and either hook up with Latvia's Waffen-SS veterans or else Go It Alone; quite possibly it is not clear to Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives either. Dr Fox also promised a "clean break from the legacy and mindset of the cold war", now that the former USSR is being run by the sort of gangster an Englishman can do business with. Again, Dr Fox does not seem to have backed up this rhetoric with anything so un-British as an actual policy, such as doing away with the nuclear deterrent which has proven so tragically ineffective at deterring the mad mullahs of Mesopotamia; but then again, perhaps Dr Fox was just blathering, as Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives so often seem to do.